Dear Parents and Carers,
Welcome to Year 2D for 2018. I am looking forward to meeting you all at the Meet The Teacher evening, to share information about your children.
The term has got off to a great start with students settling in very quickly to our classroom routines. Your child will bring home a newsletter today with information about Term 1.
Tomorrow is Safer Internet Day and we will be working on activities in class related to this.

Safer Internet Day (SID) is an annual, worldwide event held on Tuesday 6 February 2018 to help encourage a better internet, with this year’s theme ‘Create, connect and share respect: A better internet starts with you’. We will be discussing Internet safety at school and reminding students of our school acceptable Internet use agreement, which is signed by families and students upon enrollment at our school. We have a Prep – Year 2 and Year 3-6 internet acceptable use agreement. Copies of the agreement are available in the office foyer and are included below.

All classes will be doing activities to celebrate Safer Internet Day on Tuesday the 6th of February. There are many excellent resources and games for students of all ages and also informative parent information about cyber safety available on the Australian Government Office of the eSafety Commissioner Office website. The school Digital Technologies blog has also a parent page with links to parent information.

Thank you to the parents who have already dropped in to introduce themselves. I will endeavour to learn all of your names by the end of this year!
Kindest regards,
Karen Hodgkins.

Dear Parents and Carers,
Welcome to our 2D blog. We are looking forward to sharing our learning with you throughout this year.
It has been lovely to see how quickly students have settled into our new class and how excited they are about our units of work.
Thank you to the parents who have offered to assist with the Immigration Museum excursion. We now have enough to cover the excursion. We still need to have a volunteer to come on the bus with us to swimming on Thursdays, commencing 23rd February. Please let me know if you are able to help on any of the swimming days. Parent helpers require a Working With Children check.
If you haven’t already done so, please book a time on PTO for the meet the teacher evening this Thursday, or arrange a time with me if you are unable to get online. It is a valuable time for you to share information about your child.

Here are some pictures of 2D from our first week at school!

Please return the Parent-Teacher Meeting questionnaire, either before Thursday evening, or bring it along to your appointment to prompt our discussion. We are also waiting for the return of parent contact details to collate a class list to send home.
Kind regards,
Karen Hodgkins and 2D

Dear Parents and Carers,
We have been investigating how much we have grown since we were born, by comparing our measurements at birth with our measurements now. We have also been looking at the similarities and differences in our features from birth to now. If you haven’t yet sent in your child’s birth measurements, please try to get them to us as soon as possible.
As a Maths task we will be trying to calculate the difference between our height, weight and head circumference measurements.

We are able to answer Sophie’s question about what length a mealworm grows to! We have observed and measured the mealworms over the past few weeks and found that they can grow up to four centimetres long before changing into the pupal state.
We also found out that when they become darkling beetles they can live for several months. It took 41 days from when we got our mealworms until we found our first beetles this week.
We were so excited! The beetles started off as a light colour but have now turned black.

This is what the pupae look like:

Here are the darkling beetles!

JAPANESE DAY
We had a very busy Japanese Day starting with an assembly to look at costumes and then our Undoukai Japanese Sports Carnival. After recess we made Japanese fans and
Sumo wrestlers.
In tug of war we had to pull the rope really hard. Red team – aka – won! Charlie
I liked the games where we threw the balls up into the buckets. Tom
Here are some photos of the craft activities we completed.

We are looking forward to the Carnivale on Saturday. If any parents are available to help on either the 2D stall or another stall, please return the slip from the green notice that went home today, or let Mrs Hodgkins know.
If you get a chance, come into our classroom to see our beetles!
Thank you,
2D and Mrs Hodgkins.

Hello 2D families!
This coming Tuesday 25th October, Year 2 will be performing at our whole school assembly at approximately 9:30 am. We have been practising our Kung Fu punctuation as well as a song about quarter to times. I am sure we can demonstrate for you at home but we would also love to see you there if you can make it!

As we continue to investigate our mealworms we will be able to answer your questions about how long they grow and how long they live. We think some have stopped growing now and are changing into their pupal state!

Thank you for your comments and questions on our blog.
2D and Mrs Hodgkins.

Dear Parents and Carers,
We are currently conducting KidsMatter Surveys of staff, parents and students. We hope to have as many parents or carers as possible to complete the survey, so that we can continue to plan for and implement programs to support this important initiative. Your information and comments are confidential and we truly value all of your feedback. Please take the time to complete the survey. Some students in 2D have even offered to give foot massages to their parents as they work on the survey!

http://www.kidsmatter.edu.au/primary/parentsurvey
To select our school you will need to type in:
Mount Martha Primary School, MOUNT MARTHA, VIC – The schools should appear as you type. This sometimes takes a minute to load.
Select – 2016 Q4: Oct-Dec
Select the language and Year level.
Complete the survey and add comments at the end.

Dear Parents and Carers,
We would like to share with you the cartooning movie that we made in ICT. We had so much fun last term, learning how to draw cartoons on paper and computer.

This term we are excited about all of the new things we will be learning about, including Change, Protective Behaviours and Life Education. In Science we are observing how mealworms grow and change, so please come into our classroom to take a look them!

If you have any questions about how the mealworms develop or what they need to survive, please post them on our blog and our 2D Super Scientists will be able to answer them for you!
Thanks for sharing our learning.
2D and Mrs Hodgkins.

We have been having an exciting time learning about different forms of entertainment from the past and present. In Sport we have tried some different old-fashioned games such as quoits, hula hoops and elastics. Mrs Hodgkins used to play elastics when she was eight years old and she can still do it!
The two visits by Richard Galbraith have been a highlight of our entertainment unit. The cartoon drawings that the students have created are amazing. They are so proud of their achievements. Come and take a look at some of their work on display outside our classroom.

In Science we have been learning about Push and Pull forces. The students posed questions and shared their understandings about how things move. We then had a wonderful time exploring how different toys move in the air, water and on the ground. Well done to the students who have already completed their Science homework. We will be sharing this work in class.

Last week students took home a special challenge for the whole family to join in. The aim is to try to have a whole afternoon and evening without using any electronic forms of entertainment. That means no TV, X-Box, battery operated toys or games! We have brainstormed in class some ideas to entertain ourselves without these devices. The details are on the sheet that was sent home. Some families have already completed the challenge. Please help your child to record the activities you used to entertain yourselves, so that the information can be presented in class.
We will add some more photos to our next post.
Best wishes from 2D and Mrs Hodgkins.

Dear Parents and Carers,
It has been a very cold and busy start to Term 3! It is so lovely to be back with 2D and we are all looking forward to some exciting learning experiences this term. A big thank you to Mrs Van Denacker for doing such a wonderful job of caring for the class in my absence.
Please note the new Specialist timetable for this semester. We have started off with a Week 2 for Specialists. A hard copy of the timetable will be sent home this Friday.
Richard Galbraith will be here next Thursday, the 21st of July, to teach cartooning and how to create cartoon storyboards. Thank you to everyone who has returned permission forms and payments ready for the event.
Students have taken home a research project about entertainment. They will need assistance and information from parents and grandparents to complete the project. We will make comparisons between types of entertainment from the past and the present. Some students are amazed that their grandparents survived childhood without an X-Box or an I-pad!!
An important part of KidsMatter at Mt Martha Primary is to keep parents informed of what their children are learning about at school. Next Thursday evening, the 21st of July, we are hosting a You Can Do It information evening for parents and carers. The workshop provides practical ideas and strategies for effective parenting and ways you can help to support the You Can Do It program at home. This is a different session to the one that was held last year. We would love to see you at the evening. Light refreshments will be provided.